No, there is a big difference between what I did and what you did. I made a serious attempt to write a mathematical description for God. Now my description might be incomplete or otherwise flawed, but it is not a bunch of gibberish like you wrote. My description attempts to describe God as the sum of three attributes people commonly ascribe to him, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.

Your description of life is complete nonsense because nobody in their right mind views life as a function of chocolate over time. Your description is neither flawed, or incomplete. It is merely a failed attempt at ridicule presented in lieu of a competent counter argument.

Your description is not well formed, nor does it describe any property ascribed to God. I would think that the description of God should allow us to predict something about his capabilities or behaviour. Saying a set is infinite is not the same as saying it contains all possible things - there are many non-overlapping infinite sets.

I think a more useful description would at least be something like:
Let U be a set that describes the universe at a given point in time (or other free dimension).
Let natural laws be a function n such that U' = n(U) describes the changes of state to the universe over the free dimension.
God has the property of a being such that they can replace the action of the natural law n with an arbitrary alternative (miracle) function m as and when they choose to do so.

Your description doesn't explain anything about God. Actually as I read it describes the union of three sets infinite sets, such that new infinite set is formed consisting of the members of those sets. In particular, it seems the union of these infinite sets seems properly termed "the universe" or "the cosmos".

Benjamin.

Give me your argument in the form of a published paper, and then we can start to talk.

Your description is not well formed, nor does it describe any property ascribed to God. I would think that the description of God should allow us to predict something about his capabilities or behaviour. Saying a set is infinite is not the same as saying it contains all possible things - there are many non-overlapping infinite sets.

I think a more useful description would at least be something like:
Let U be a set that describes the universe at a given point in time (or other free dimension).
Let natural laws be a function n such that U' = n(U) describes the changes of state to the universe over the free dimension.
God has the property of a being such that they can replace the action of the natural law n with an arbitrary alternative (miracle) function m as and when they choose to do so.

Your description doesn't explain anything about God. Actually as I read it describes the union of three sets infinite sets, such that new infinite set is formed consisting of the members of those sets. In particular, it seems the union of these infinite sets seems properly termed "the universe" or "the cosmos".

Benjamin.

I didn't like my mathematical description of God when I wrote it by I figured it would suffice to show that you can use mathematics to describe anything....including God. I'm not really interested in describing God mathematically so I didn't spend a lot of time on it. You are correct something should be put in that illustrates God's purported ability to suspend the laws of physics.

Your description is not well formed, nor does it describe any property ascribed to God. I would think that the description of God should allow us to predict something about his capabilities or behaviour. Saying a set is infinite is not the same as saying it contains all possible things - there are many non-overlapping infinite sets.

I think a more useful description would at least be something like:
Let U be a set that describes the universe at a given point in time (or other free dimension).
Let natural laws be a function n such that U' = n(U) describes the changes of state to the universe over the free dimension.
God has the property of a being such that they can replace the action of the natural law n with an arbitrary alternative (miracle) function m as and when they choose to do so.

Your description doesn't explain anything about God. Actually as I read it describes the union of three sets infinite sets, such that new infinite set is formed consisting of the members of those sets. In particular, it seems the union of these infinite sets seems properly termed "the universe" or "the cosmos".

Benjamin.

I didn't like my mathematical description of God when I wrote it by I figured it would suffice to show that you can use mathematics to describe anything....including God. I'm not really interested in describing God mathematically so I didn't spend a lot of time on it. You are correct something should be put in that illustrates God's purported ability to suspend the laws of physics.

If G=god

Then G= the answer to every mathematical problem ever.

Member of the Cult of Reason

The atheist is a man who destroys the imaginary things which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
-Baron d'Holbach-

No, there is a big difference between what I did and what you did. I made a serious attempt to write a mathematical description for God. Now my description might be incomplete or otherwise flawed, but it is not a bunch of gibberish like you wrote. My description attempts to describe God as the sum of three attributes people commonly ascribe to him, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.

Your description of life is complete nonsense because nobody in their right mind views life as a function of chocolate over time. Your description is neither flawed, or incomplete. It is merely a failed attempt at ridicule presented in lieu of a competent counter argument.

What you wrote was complete nonsense, and trying to convince yourself it wasn't is a bit deluded if not comical..

Btw, if your GOD is omniscient and omnipotent, can it create new information and knowledge it doesn't already know? If you say yes, it was never actually omniscient and by default of the problem of infinite egress, it could never be omniscient, and thus it could never make itself omniscient due to the paradox of infinite egress. And thus it would also nullify it's supposed "omnipotence". Saying it can not would also defy, once again, this supposed omnipotence and omniscience as it would neither know how, or could.. It's a self-refuting idea.. And arguing arbitrary context is admitting it never is, was, or ever will be.

Also, if your GOD is omnipresent, where do I exist? Well, if you believe that, get on your knees and pray to me for I am here son! .. Did you even stop to think about this crap before posting this crap?

Also, if you want to break everything down in terms of mathematics, the 3 things you should look at are simply "Positive, Negative, and Neutral" to which is pretty much the base mathematical fundamentals of everything. Hence it can be argued that there can only ever be a positive, negative, or neutral:

You also can't literally create Mathematics as that is inherent of reality and existence itself. Hence you yourself must have a value greater than zero to even exist, thus the whole GOD thing is nonsense. Your mathematics are simply nonsense.. And btw, in set theory, no entity other than existence itself can be said to represent a Universal Set of all sets. Thus you trying to use set theory is comical because you would have to claim your GOD as being outside the Universal Set, or of existence itself. And I don't think you are going to try and go there are you? Worse yet, a conscious state can not by all means exist without cause anymore than your image on your computer screen can not display without cause.. This gets into information science and theory to which includes time frames of reference.. And I don't think you will likely comprehend the complexity of that issue..

(09-03-2013 12:21 AM)Heywood Jahblome Wrote: Suppose there is a bin and you are told the bin contains marbles. You can't see into the bin but you are able to reach into the bin and pull out a marble. You wonder to yourself, what colors are the marbles in that bin?

What happens if you reach into the bin and pull out a white marble? You get information. You get information about the unknown composition of the bin. You know that the bin contained at least one white marble. It could contain marbles of other colors, or all the marbles that were/are in the bin could be white. You reach into the bin an pull out another white marble. You have more information about the initial composition of the bin....it had a least 2 white marbles and it became more likely that all marbles in the bin are white. In fact the more white marbles you draw without ever finding a non white marble, the more likely it becomes that all marbles in the bin are white.

The atheists on this forum should not disagree with this logic at all. It gives them good cause to reject claims of miracles. The more "miracles" that turn out to have natural explaination, the more likely it is that all miracles have natural explaination.

Does anyone disagree with the reasoning in this thread?

One thing that needs to be understood is the nature of probability. Probability consists of two things: 1)the expectation that an experiment will give the same result as previous identical experiments and 2)the confidence of that expectation. When we say probability we usually mean the expectation.

Take an example similar to that presented by the OP. What probability should we assign to possibility that the sun will rise tomorrow? The experiment is to look to the east every morning and record whether the sun comes up. There are two possible results: YES or NO. If we assume that the human race has been keeping records for 5000 years and further assume (unscientifically perhaps) that a NO result would be significant enough to justify recording, then the number of YES is 1,826,250; the number of NO is zero, and our expectation is 1.0, i.e., certainty. Furthermore, given the large number of times the experiment has been repeated, our confidence is very near 100%.

In the example given the experiment is to pull a sample of N=1 marbles from the bin. The poster does not say whether the total number of marbles is finite, infinite or great enough to be considered infinite, or whether the sample is replaced and the bin shuffled after examination, equivalent to an infinite bin.

After pulling one white marble from the bin our expectation that the next will also be white is 1.0 However, having performed the experiment only once, our confidence is zero(or nearly so). After pulling a second white marble our expectation is still 1.0 and our confidence has risen slightly, but not much.

After repeating the experiment 1,000,000 times with the same result our confidence is very high, near 100%, but still less than 100%. Unless we perform the experiment an infinite number of times our confidence will never be 100%

Humans arrived on Earth on 22 October 4004 B.C. A few of us are still trying to repair the ship.